Search for stories through a lens an enduring allure

Ansel Adams’ iconic landscape photographs of the American West are legendary, but there’s much more to the area than spectacular landscapes. Magnetic West: The Enduring Allure of the American West is a new book that showcases more than 160 photographs by some of the renowned photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries and two of the photographs in the book are by Perth photographer Brett Leigh Dicks. Brett was born in Australia but followed his aunt to the US and lived there for 20 years before returning to Perth two years ago. His photographic work primarily investigates the landscape and the fragile ties that it shares with human history. An exhibition of his which documents nuclear missile bases was spotted at a Cold War Museum in Canada by the curator of the Figge Art Museum in Iowa. After seeing some of Brett’s other work, he decided to include his pictures in a touring exhibition about the American West. “The book is a follow-on from that,” Brett says as he shows his pictures in the book. Brett’s style is influenced by photographers such as Steven Shaw, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, who started a movement called New Topography as a reaction to Ansel Adams’ work. They felt Adams painted grandiose portraits of American landscapes that really didn’t exist. “I love symmetry,” Brett says. “I just love all the lines and the way they intersect and spread out and diverge and I try not to let anything distract from that in a photograph.” Although most of Brett’s pictures don’t have people in them, his favourite picture in this book is one he captured of a young boy at Mt Rushmore. “This one was made on one of my first trips through the northern part of America when I was working on the nuclear missile series nearby,” he says. “Whenever you’re in a location like Yosemite, Yellowstone or New York, with the Statue of Liberty, that have been photographed a billion times before, it is always difficult to add something different to that conversation. The last thing I want to come away with as a photographer is a cliche postcard, so I’m always looking for something different. “Sometimes that happens just by accident and this photograph was one of those accidents. I was standing there on the steps taking the cliche photograph of Mt Rushmore and the cliff face with the carvings on it and turned around and saw this young man standing beside me photographing exactly what I was photographing. I saw the reflections of the faces in the window in the background so I raised my camera and at that point, he raised his camera and looked at me, so I made the exposure and immediately knew that I had something but it wasn’t until I developed the film two weeks later that I knew that I had something special,” he said. Brett uses a Hasselblad medium format film camera for much of his work because he likes the process and the distinctive film look it gives him. His other picture in the book is one he took for his Nuclear Landscape series. It shows the monument at the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated. The monument casts a long shadow towards the camera. “It’s also one of these places that has been photographed a few times and again, I wanted to do something different and there’s that metaphor of the nuclear age casting a shadow in that period of time. It was the obvious thing to me and it was how I felt about that atomic blast,” Brett says. “Even though our nuclear arsenals have been reduced they are still huge and it all originated from that moment at that location. The consequences of the test are still apparent today and I wanted something that could represent that as well and doing it in colour would take away that element of it.” Brett loves to photograph WA country towns. He says places such as Narrogin and Katanning are absolutely brilliant. I mention a picture of his that shows the service station coming into Beverley from one of his collections. “It’s a thing of beauty, the architecture is just poetry and I hope they don’t lose that. It should be State heritage listed,” he says. “It’s funny coming from here after spending so long in America because you drive from one side of America to another and it’s like driving across Europe. The cultures are so different but here there’s a uniformity to it but the differences are subtle but really beautiful. The furniture store on the corner in Narrogin is just so bland and large and it’s surrounded by so much openness and I just love that. It makes a statement. There’s a real history there and it really worries me that it is going to be lost.” Magnetic West: The Enduring Allure of the American West is assembled from many public and private collections and a beautiful insight into landscape and the communities of the region.